Chapter Twenty-Seven

Carwyn didn't waste time after they ended the calls with Oleg and Katya. Those two vampire regents would have to figure out their territorial disputes eventually, but before that, they had a usurper and a sociopath to deal with.

"I wonder," Brigid muttered.

He looked over at his wife, who was finally beside him, working next to him like she should have been for months.

His heart took a quick double beat when he looked at her.

She noticed and glanced over. "What's up?"

"I'd break the world for you," he said quietly. "You know that, don't you?"

Brigid's focus broke and her eyes softened. "I don't want you to break it. Not for me or anyone."

"That's why I'd do it without a second thought." He took a slow, measured breath. "It was a risk doing that. Jennie had twenty vampires gathered around."

"We calculated the risk of danger against the danger of continuin' to work on parallel tracks."

"I know, and you were right." He frowned. "You understand Oleg better than I do."

"Yeah." She nodded. "I asked some mutual friends for their opinions before I went to him for help last autumn. Talked to Anne and her sister Mary. Reached out to Terry in London to get his read. He's had some dealin's with Mika in the past."

"Look at you, my brilliant woman." The corner of his mouth turned up. "How did you get so smart?"

"Genetics and a lot of fuckups." She leaned over and pressed a long kiss to his mouth. "And I've learned a few things about human nature from the wisest man I know."

He caught her around the waist. "How dare you call me wise."

"Don't worry," she whispered. "I won't let your secret get out."

Carwyn pulled her down to the bench and settled her between his spread legs. "It was still a risk. Katya could have gone either way."

"I know, and we're in her territory." She looked up. "But I also know that my husband is a force of nature who'd break the world for me."

He rested his chin on her shoulder. "And my wife is a warrior who commands fire."

She snapped her fingers and brought a glowing yellow flame to her palm, holding it just over her skin. "You might break the world for me, Carwyn ap Bryn, but if anyone tried to hurt you, I'd turn this forest into ash, and I don't think I'd care who I hurt."

"No, you're wrong." He reached out, warming his fingers over the yellow-gold flame in her hand. "Your heart is bigger than the ocean out there, Brigid. You do what needs to be done, my girl, but you're never thoughtless about it."

"I wondered." She turned her face to his. "After Zasha seemed to become so… infatuated with me. I wondered why. I wondered if there was somethin' about me that they recognized. Somethin' I wasn't seein' in myself. Some weakness or cruelty."

"There's nothing about you that's the same as Zasha."

"No." She put a hand on his cheek. "That's not true. I think Zasha's life was quite horrible as a human. I'm certain of it. They've been powerless. They know what that feels like."

"Lots of people—human and immortal—suffer in life, Brigid. And the vast majority never hurt other people. At least not intentionally."

"I know." She nodded. "Mika Arakas told me once that Zasha is fascinated with me because they see my fear but I live with it and haven't allowed hate to consume me."

Carwyn never expected to find wisdom in the words of an Estonian assassin, but there you go. Life still held surprises. "Mika isn't wrong. You know fear, but you don't allow it to control you."

"I was workin' with Oleg when I realized somethin' else."

He narrowed his eyes. "What do you mean, working with Oleg?"

She turned the fire in the palm of her hand. "On my fire. On controllin' it. I only ever trained with Kathy, and that was right after I turned."

"I'm surprised he helped you."

She rolled her eyes. "He's not that bad."

"He'd like to restore the empire his sire allowed to fracture, and he'll do it in such an underhanded fashion people won't even realize he's consolidating power."

Brigid opened her mouth, then closed it.

Carwyn raised his eyebrows. "You know I'm right."

"But is that necessarily a bad thing? Not for humans, but for our kind?"

She had a point, but Carwyn hated to admit it.

"He'll run into problems in Central Asia if he keeps going." Carwyn pulled her back. "What did you realize when you were working with Oleg on your fire?"

"I didn't realize it really. It was him."

That damn Russian. If he wasn't dead certain that his wife would incinerate Oleg if she spent too much time with the Russian, he might actually be jealous. "Fine, what did Oleg say?"

"He said: your fire cannot serve you if it is always protecting you." She looked at Carwyn. "Do ya think he's right?"

Carwyn let out a soft breath. "I know he's right."

Elemental energy was a curious thing. Carwyn's element was earth, but his relationship to that element was entirely different to Brigid's connection to fire.

The earth was a nurturing mother. It grew life and held all of nature and human civilization on its sturdy back. While Carwyn commanded the earth, he did so as a supplicant.

Any request he made of his element was a gesture of humility because he would never be more powerful than the whole of earthly matter. But the whole of earthly matter was also designed to nurture life.

Fire wasn't a mother or a foundation. It was a feral lion that had to be mastered. It could be protective. It could be territorial, and it was ferocious in battle.

But it was still a lion.

Carwyn said, "Old fire vampires are dominant personalities for a reason."

Brigid lifted her chin. "Like me."

"I know." Carwyn knew she had to be. Any immortal not strong enough to hold that leash would be consumed by it. Carwyn whispered, "But you're also at the average age."

Brigid blinked. "What's that?"

"You're at the average age of a fire vampire," he repeated softly. "You've been a vampire for roughly fourteen years."

"And?"

"That's about average," he said. "It's not like there've been studies, my love. But after a thousand years, you notice things. And one of them is that if a fire vampire makes it past fifteen, chances are" —he nodded— "they'll survive."

Her expression was bleak. "Because most of us die young."

Carwyn nodded. "Your element isn't a kind mother, Brigid. It's a lion."

"It'll serve me, but only if it doesn't have to protect me," she murmured. "So how do I let my lion know that I don't need to be protected?"

He shook his head. "I don't know."

"Maybe a better question is: Does that man at the circus ever really tame the lion?" The corner of her mouth turned up. "Or is it all an elaborate trick?"

Summer Mackenzie tapped the tablet to end her call with her sire before she turned to the vampire sitting on her right. "Well, that's interesting."

"What is it?" Her best friend, Raven, was flipping through files across the room, fingering the short twists she'd just had braided into her normally short-cropped hair.

"Leave your hair alone. It's cute."

Raven huffed out a breath. "It feels weird. What did the boss want?"

"Do you recognize the name Henri Paulson?"

Katya's office in Vancouver was a concrete apartment building in the Beach District. Perched on the seawall and overlooking the harbor, the building housed most of the vampire's support staff in the city. It sat right on the water, which made water vampires like Summer happy, but it also had wraparound balconies, which made air vampires like Raven content.

Raven shrugged. "Paulson's a tech billionaire of the fanged persuasion. Water type. He's in and out of the port in the summer, but he doesn't cause trouble."

"Does he have day people around here that you know of?"

Raven narrowed dark brown eyes and looked at the glowing lights of Vancouver out the window. "I can think of two or three people who would probably work with him, but I don't know that they're exclusive."

Summer had discovered that around any vampire community, there were contract employees who were hired to do daylight jobs but not permanently attached to any particular vampire. They were kind of like immortal gig workers, and Summer had even used a few in her time for… personal errands.

"Katya wants us to go to the gold exchange tomorrow night."

Raven's eyebrows went up. "Why?"

"Sounds like Paulson's up to something," Summer said. "Someone told the boss that he's moving a ton of gold into Vancouver, getting a lot of Canadian dollars. Enough to be noticeable."

"Okay," Raven said. "He might be buying a new boat or something. I think that guy is obsessed with boats. Mostly lives on one." She cocked her head. "Would you do that?"

"Live on a boat?" Summer considered it. "I might, but I like fresh water more than salt. I'd live in a houseboat in a hot minute though. Or one of those canal boats in Europe."

"Yeah, those are cool." Raven shook her head. "But I would not be your roommate."

"Fair enough." Summer looked at the notes she'd taken while she was on the phone with her sire. "Katya wants to find out what Paulson's doing with all the cash he's pulling out."

Raven put down her files. "Wait, he's taking all this gold out of the exchange in cash?"

"Yeah. Twenty million worth of green Canadian dollars, my friend."

Raven's mouth dropped open. "That's… a lot of cash. And Canadian currency isn't green."

Summer pushed away from her desk and spun in her chair. "Why aren't we tech billionaires?"

"We should be."

"Right? No more filing." Summer lifted up a manila folder. "We could hire people to do filing."

Raven stared into the distance. "And fill out incident reports."

"We could hire people to be us, and then we could be cool, badass vampires."

"Speak for yourself." Raven sniffed. "I'm already a badass vampire."

"Keep telling yourself that the next time you're arguing with Baojia about the new incident-report form and why it's not as good as the old one."

Raven flipped her off. "To be fair, we weren't even born when Henri Paulson started investing in Silicon Valley, so he has a head start."

"Details." Summer rolled back to her desk and pulled out the compact 9mm handgun Baojia had given her for her birthday the year before. "Dusk tomorrow, Katya said. She wants me to go inside and you watch from above. We'll need to get Lang to monitor their comms. She wants to know who they contact when I go in and start asking questions."

"They won't answer any of them," Raven said. "You know the exchanges run on privacy. They're independent of aegis."

"I know, but depending on who they call or what messengers they send after I go in, that might tell Katya what she needs to know."

"Gotcha." Raven stood. "I'll let Lang know. Tomorrow night?"

"Yeah." Summer leaned back and kicked her feet up on the desk. "We get to shake that apple tree and see where the rats run out."

Raven just shook her head. "You are the hickest hick that ever did hick, Summer Mackenzie."

"Don't be jealous of my colorful Carolina vernacular just because you come from the frigid north, Jessup."

"My people are from Chicago, okay? Not the Yukon." Raven shook her head and walked out to the balcony. "See you at home."

Raj was on a plane to Vancouver before the captain even connected the call from his boss. "Why am I flying to Canada?"

"Because I may need you there." Gavin's voice was clipped. "Did I inconvenience you?"

"I know who I work for." Though Raj had been doing some very amusing surveillance on a group of teenagers from a charter school in Long Beach who had been trying to hack into the Paladin servers.

The group of four boys and two girls had found rumors about Paladin on the dark web and decided that it must be full of spies, crypto-millionaires, and drug dealers instead of centuries-old vampires who were constantly forgetting their passwords or filing reports on YouTube videos that got historical events wrong.

"If you open your email," Gavin said, "you're going to find a file on Henri Paulson."

Raj recognized the name immediately. "I know him."

"Mild-mannered tech billionaire by day?—"

"Nothing about Paulson is mild-mannered," Raj muttered. "Mila almost worshipped him. Thought he had all the right ideas. Vampires are the superior species. Humans are basically cattle, and immortals need to thin the herd so we don't suffer from their bad choices. Human governments shouldn't have any control over us or our resources."

"The whole buffet of vampire conspiracy, I see."

"Oh yeah." Raj tried not to think about his toxic former lover, especially since she was dead, but at times the security work he did for Gavin Wallace made it impossible.

"Tell me what you know," Gavin said. "Beyond the conspiracy buffet. The man has more money than nearly anyone in our world, so he's not an idiot."

"He's not an idiot, but…" Raj took a deep breath. "Paulson thinks he's a genius, but he's not. He has a nearly cultlike following among water vampires in South Asia. Lots of them into the floating-city thing."

"What about you?"

Raj shook his head. "I may be a water vampire, but even I know it's not a feasible plan. We need humans to live, and humans need land. Not that Paulson cares much about humans."

"Brigid called him an imperialist."

"That's not wrong as long as he gets to be emperor. Paulson's young, but he's got grand aspirations, and he does have a knack for spotting opportunities before they become obvious. He'll find an actual genius, pump up their ego, and then steal their ideas or cheat them out of their intellectual property. Remember, he thinks humans are a natural resource like timber or wheat. He has no respect for their autonomy or their lives."

"Hmm. So he steals ideas and profits from them. Any idea who might be thinking of a Northwest shipping passage and gaining control of Alaska?"

"No, but with the environment going the direction it is, it's not a bad plan."

Who would benefit? Katya Grigorieva was the obvious answer, but Oleg was just on the other side of the Bering Strait. Then there were all the interests in Northern Europe who would love a faster shipping channel to Asia.

"Shipping isn't really your area, is it?" Raj wrinkled his nose, but he had to offer the best suggestion he could think of. "Have you talked to Brigid Connor? She used to work for Patrick Murphy, and she's on the West Coast now."

"She's already there," Gavin said. "You may be working with her and her mate. You don't have to be friendly, but you do have to be polite."

The last time he'd encountered the small fire vampire and her massive mate, they'd been accusing him of betraying Gavin and conspiring with the Ankers.

"Gavin, does this have to do with the Zasha Sokholov mess?"

"Yes. Zasha is in Alaska, and we think they're working with Henri Paulson."

A knot of dread curled in Raj's belly. "Paulson isn't as smart as I thought he was."

"I can't disagree." Gavin's Scottish brogue got a little heavier. "I think Paulson met a vampire who saw through him faster than he could anticipate."

"So is Paulson leading Zasha or is Zasha leading Paulson?"

"Either way, these people threatened my wife and I want you there."

"Understood." Raj took a deep breath and glanced out the window as the lights of Los Angeles retreated in the distance. "I'm on my way."